Thoughts on Henry V

Leaders in scholarship on Shakespeare in the theatre, Dr Kate Flaherty (ANU) and Dr Rob Conkie (La Trobe) are joining to speak on Australia’s engagement with Shakespeare’s Henry V in performance, as a commentary on war, on nation and on history.

“When the first ANZAC Day (25 April 1916) collided with the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (23 April 1916), a special kind of challenge was issued to the Australian commemorative calendar. To this day productions of Henry V still bear traces of the ways in which the newly federated nation met this challenge. From a newsreel of a ‘Shakespeare in the Schools’ on the steps of the ANZAC memorial in 1955, to the 1995 Bell Shakespeare production featuring ‘diggers’, to the 2014 Bell production which couched its meditation of war politics in the context of the London blitz, Australian treatments of the play map a specifically Australian politics of war remembrance.”